Bumptop looks like a very cool new computer GUI paradigm. It’s like a logical extension of the “Desktop” model, adding physics based movement, and allowing you to group your files/objects in “piles” and view and manipulate them in various ways.
Not sure what OS is running under-the-hood here, though; the most information I could find was from Anand Agarawala’s Master’s Thesis, for which Bumptop was apparently created:
BumpTop was developed on a Toshiba Portége M200 TabletPC with a 1.6 Ghz Intel processor, 1 GB RAM and a GeForce FX Go 5200 graphics card. The BumpTop prototype is written with C++, OpenGL and GLUT. Rigid Body Dynamics and collision detection are provided by the NovodeX Physics SDK (www.novodex.com) which is a high-performance physics engine popular amongst game developers and is used to power the marquee first-person shooter Unreal Tournament. Some desktop item icons were designed by David Vignoni from the Nuvola icon theme.
I’d guess that it is probably running on top of Windows, then, though the use of OpenGL suggests the possibility that a port to a Linux desktop would be possible. I don’t know about you, but this is cool.
I think physics-based touch/pen interfaces are going to be the future of our human-computer interactions… it will be interesting to see what form these finally take.
See also:
Bumptop Prototype
Keeping it real: Pushing the desktop metaphor with physics, piles, and the pen
